Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.

Errr. If her ‘clan’ thought she was ‘shaming’ them…then they might have decided to ‘end’ it. End it. By which he means, murder them; by which he means, shoot both of them multiple times. Well, yeah, I suppose that is one way to ‘end’ something. I suppose if someone stands too close to you at the bus stop, you can ‘end’ it by killing her. But in all fairness, that’s not what is usually meant by ‘ending’ an affair. Not to mention the fact that there wasn’t an affair anyway. Cole appears to have read the Telegraph article he linked to very sloppily. It doesn’t say they were having an affair, or that they were ‘romantically involved,’ and it says several things to indicate that there is a lot of room for doubt that they were – such as the fact that Vincent was planning to marry his interpreter for visa purposes, and that his wife was aware of that. The popinjays link to a site that posts a letter Vincent’s wife wrote to Cole. It makes for warm reading.

But even apart from that – the rest of it is staggering all on its own. ‘In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men.’ Excuse me? Protect? By killing them? That’s ‘protection’? He himself acknowledges (without apparently noticing that he’s done so) the nature of the protection in the very next sentence – ‘Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her.’ What’s the deal, here? Did it take him so long to compose and type the 33 words between ‘protect’ and ‘kill’ that he forgot he’d said the first by the time he got to the second? Or is he just stupid. Or is he worse than that, is he so intent on making ‘honor’ killing sound vaguely acceptable that – that he can write a piece of dreck like that.

Update. He’s even worse than I thought. He wrote a follow-up post in reaction to Lisa Ramaci-Vincent’s reply to him. (But he calls her ‘Mrs Vincent’ – which is obnoxious, to put it mildly, since she signed herself Lisa Ramaci-Vincent. Why does Cole get to decide what her name is? Why does he get to correct her on her own name? More concern for male honor?) It’s enough to put me off me dinner.

Clueless Americans don’t understand the principle of gender segregation for the most part, and if they do understand it they are horrified by it. But in large swathes of the world, it just is not considered right for a male to be in the company of an unrelated female. It isn’t just a matter of sleeping around, as my wingnut correspondents assume. It is being alone in the company of an unrelated man or woman, and having that be known publicly. Male honor is invested in the protection of the virginity of female relatives, and a conviction that something improper may have occurred would be enough in some instances to cause a vendetta. It is not just a Muslim thing. Many Orthodox Jews and Middle Eastern and Balkan Christians feel the same way.

Clueless Americans don’t understand gender segregation, and they don’t understand clan honor as practiced in most Arab societies. We American men aren’t dishonored in particular if our sisters sleep around, though I suppose in high school it can’t be pleasant for a guy to have everyone taunt him that his sister is a slut. But in Arab culture, a brother can’t show his face in public if his sister is known to be a slut.

36 Responses to “We Had to Destroy the Woman to Save Her”

Wow! I went to Cole’s website half expecting him to have been misquoted (not by you, OB) or otherwise been a bit unfairly treated. In fact, he is even worse! Amazing for an academic at such a university to be so careless with the facts. A very sloppy job worthy of a bad journalist.

What’s truly reprehensible is the way he is deliberately endangering the Iraqi woman interpreter’s life with this calumny of her character. Her family may know the truth but they are helpless to protect her against further attacks from those stalwart defenders of ‘mediterranean’ culture and there WILL be such, with unabashed and unsubtle edging on from the likes of Juan Cole.

There are kinds of knowing. Vincent could not read a book about the Middle East written by a Middle Easterner in Arabic. He did not understand Shiite religious law. He saw the surface of things because he was there. He did not know their depths. How many of us would accept an art critic’s claim to be an expert on French politics and culture when he could not read French literature and had only been in France off and on for 18 months?”

I would have thought that one could know something ‘serious’ about French politics and culture without having to be an expert. Presumably none of us can know anything serious about anything, and thus should just damn well shut up, unless we are proper experts, like Prof. Cole. I mean, if you didn’t realise he was referring to Braudel’s greater Mediterranean when he refers to Iraq being a Mediterranean country what right have you to comment at all?

I’m sorry, I disagree with you all’s take on Mr. Cole. As your posts repeatedly note, this aspaect of Middle Eastern culture IS PREVALENT. Americans do NOT understand this aspect of the culture. Is he really “defending it” per se, or simply noting the importance of this (admittedly horrific) strain of clan-based culture. I’ve never read him as necessarily supporting or glorifying the more negative attributes of middle eastern culture, just noting how deeply ingrained they are (and how naive we are to assume that we can wave a magic wand and get rid of them. After all, aren’t women now worse off in many respects post-liberation? That is an ongoing theme of his posts!

“Is he really “defending it” per se, or simply noting the importance of this (admittedly horrific) strain of clan-based culture?”

“Clueless Americans don’t understand the principle of gender segregation for the most part, and if they do understand it they are horrified by it. But….”

Even if Americans understand it, they are still so clueless as to be horrified by it. BUT–ah, that all important but!–if these clueless Americans were as hip as I, they’d view such things with equinimity. The only thing worth getting worked up about are people who get worked up about such things as honor killings and the subjugation of women.

I agree with Brian Miller. I see nothing in Dr. Cole’s statements that excuses or defends honor killings.

You seem to be reading his piece as an explanation – even a defense – of Vincent’s killing. I read it differently: he wasn’t saying that this is why Vincent was killed, he was saying that this is what can happen when you act this way in Iraq. I thought Cole was using it as a peg on which to hang a warning that “clueless Americans” can easily and unintentionally cause great offense in foreign countries when they don’t truly understand the depths of feeling this sort of conduct can arouse. Whether the offended feelings are rational by our standards is not the point – the danger is the point. And as he says, sometimes just the appearance is enough to get you killed.

In short, I read it as resembling warnings not to assume that the tap water is safe to drink or that the local police will respect your rights. It’s just one more way you can put your life at risk in a foreign country.

One would think that a professor and public intellectual like Juan Cole would be able to express himself more clearly, without any ambiguity. If all he meant to do was to give a ‘safety warning’, he could easily have done so without seeming to sneer at ‘clueless Americans’ and poor Mr Vincent, or being so cold and dismissive towards the recently widowed Ms Ramaci-Vincent. As written, Cole’s piece reeks of condescension and cold-bloodedness.

Indeed. And there’s that staggering comment about ‘sluts’. And the whole euphemistic discussion of ‘sexual segregation’ – as if it applied in the same way to both sexes – when in fact what it means is imprisonment and deprivation of women enforced by violence.

Exactly, Ophelia. It’s the tone that Cole uses. He sounds smug and cold. He seems to be saying, in effect, ‘I told you so’. This is completely inappropriate under such sad and grisly circumstances. Then there is also his casual use of ‘slut’ to make an very poor analogy. The word seems to come suspiciously easily to him. And as you and another commentator have said, his reasoning is very sloppy.

“Then there is also his casual use of ‘slut’ to make a very poor analogy.”

On the contrary, it makes a very good analogy. His attitude toward women is the same brutal, sneering, swinish one you’ll find all round the world. Says a lot about Cole that he’d stoop to use the word “slut” to support his inane, confused argument. Plus, as Mira noted, his thoughtless (?) endangering of Vincent’s translator casts further suspicion on him–he’s either stupid or vicious (or both).

Oh I read it as a clueless American blithely tarring all Mediterranean men with the cultural brush of hardcore Islamic countries.

Perhaps you overlooked the part where Cole says “These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas.” This hardly constitutes blithely tarring all Mediterranean men.

Silly me.

Indeed.

Brian T. Urmann–

sneer at … poor Mr Vincent

Cole writes, “Vincent, as an American male going about in public and private with an unrelated Iraqi woman, put himself in the position of being seen as symbolizing this joint sexual and colonial humiliation. It may well have been part of the reason he was killed.”

Cole writes, “I understand the grief of a bereaved widow, and I am not interested in arguing with her. (snip) Most of her beefs seem to me to have to do with Mr. Freeman’s article, which I referred to as part of the “news consolidation” aspect of this blog.”

Cold? Dismissive? Again, I don’t see it.

And now his tone is in effectcompletely inappropriate. Well, I guess if you have to, you can always find something.

OB–

Oh and don’t forget the bit about the man protecting ‘his’ womenfolk by killing them. I didn’t misread that. Cole may have miswritten it, but I didn’t misread it.

Cole writes, “…protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. (snip) Where a woman of the family sleeps around…it is not unknown for them to kill her.” This killing happens after the men have failed to adequately protect the clan’s honor. It is a last resort, not a matter of course. Of course, it’s not fair or reasonable to attack the woman and we all deplore it, but there is no denying that it happens. (And, as a matter of logic, if that were how all the men protected the women they are related to – or “their” women – there would be no women left.

Any defense he may have offered lies only in your twisted misreading. All I see is a description of a pattern of cultural behavior. If you object to the message, why are you criticising the messenger?

And by the way, he doesn’t write “sexual segragation”; it’s “gender segregation.” I suppose that this is the common terminology in his academic specialty, similar to “Greater Mediterranean (please read Fernand Braudel) ethos”, and that when he uses it in that context, his listeners know that it includes imprisonment and deprivation of women enforced by violence. Why do you assume that because he doesn’t spell it out, he doesn’t think it’s there or that it’s really OK?

Emm…there’s no difference between an anthropological description and an endorsement? Do all efforts at interpretive understanding across real differences automatically imply validity, such that they therefore should be shunned? One of the motives for murder, other than revenge, is a perceived threat that brings about fear of disintegration of identity. Psychotic murders are at the extreme end of that spectrum, though their actually uncommon. Is a psychiatrist who testifies for the defense at a murder trial thereby endorsing the action of the defendant?

When I read the Cole post at the time, I just thought it was premature, a speed of the internet kind of thing. I also noticed the “Mediterranean” thing, when Basra is not so located, but Cole later clarified his point, that it was not particularly an Islamic “thing”, but widely distributed across a range of cultures. (IIRC, the widow played by Irene Pappas in “Zorba the Greek” was murdered at the end. It’s the harshness of the famous “idiocy of rural life” that’s at fault.) But what Cole was noting in his commentary was the attempted murder of the translator, which was a bit odd, if Vincent’s assasination was just politically motivated to shut him up. (And the bit about the pledge to marry the translator, when he was already married is really odd, as the U.S.I.N.S. carefully screeens marriages to foreigners to prevent such fraud.) What Cole, however, clearly was implying was a “Quiet American” type case, an “innocent” adventurer in a foreign land, out of his depth, who, regardless of his intentions, unwittingly brings about havoc on himself and others. But we’ll probably never know the nature of the case, given the current state of play in Basra.

Juan Cole is a history professor at U. of Mich. specializing in Shia Islam. He’s conversant, I think, in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, and lived and studied in Beruit during the early phases of the Lebanese Civil War. So you might think he knows something of what he’s talking about and not just in academic terms. (He also converted to the Bahai religion, before having a falling out with the authoritarian hierarchy of the cult, though perhaps he’s still a Bahai “heretic”, so he’s no friend of the Iranian mullahs.) He’s actually quite moderate, and has been arguing that the U.S. needs to stay in Iraq for quite some time, to prevent still worse violence, though I think he’s beginning to revise that view. But he’s a real scholar, not a media pundit or think-tank operator, so he expresses himself in a coolly detached, analytic manner. If that’s “snooty”, so be it, but its’s also a trained norm. Evidently, direspecting and slurring the authority of laboriously acquired expert knowledge is only objectionable if it’s done by fashionable po-mo types.

Cole writes, “…protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. (snip) Where a woman of the family sleeps around…it is not unknown for them to kill her.” This killing happens after the men have failed to adequately protect the clan’s honor.

Sorry, that won’t fly. In the passage you quote, he says ‘protect his womenfolk’, not ‘protect the clan’s honor’. The mention of clan honor isn’t even in that paragraph. You can’t protect people by killing them – that’s simply a contradiction in terms. So less of the ‘twisted misreading’ talk, if you don’t mind. By all means disagree, but be civil.

And by the way, he doesn’t write “sexual segragation”; it’s “gender segregation.” I suppose that this is the common terminology in his academic specialty, similar to “Greater Mediterranean (please read Fernand Braudel) ethos”, and that when he uses it in that context, his listeners know that it includes imprisonment and deprivation of women enforced by violence. Why do you assume that because he doesn’t spell it out, he doesn’t think it’s there or that it’s really OK?

Hmmm. So if someone wrote about the ‘relocation’ of Jews by the Nazis you would argue that was common terminology in the poster’s academic specialty, and readers would know it includes a shower with Zyklon-B at the end? If someone wrote about the employment of blacks in the Southern US in the period from, say, 1789 to 1860, readers would know that ‘includes’ the absence of pay, the inability to leave, the lack of a contract, the being bought and sold, the having one’s children and spouse sold?

“So you might think he knows something of what he’s talking about and not just in academic terms.”

I do think he knows a lot about what he’s talking about. But I also think he has some revolting attitudes. The one does not preclude the other. People can know a lot about what they’re talking about and still be dead wrong – obviously.

“Evidently, direspecting and slurring the authority of laboriously acquired expert knowledge is only objectionable if it’s done by fashionable po-mo types.”

Disrespecting? Slurring? The authority? Excuse me? You sound as if you’re planning a fatwa.

“Perhaps you overlooked the part where Cole says “These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas.” This hardly constitutes blithely tarring all Mediterranean men.”

Sorry to hark on, but, seriously. So what if he’s only talking about rural and uneducated Mediterranean men, do you have any idea of the differences between Southern European men and Muslim men on the question of honour killings? So why can a university professor go throwing about imprecise accusations of a ‘Mediterranean’ culture of killing women, it’s down right racist. I just can’t understand how we can take seriously someone who can blithely throw words about with no apparent regard to their meaning, it’s not like Europe is a particularly alien environment to an American. The phenomenon of ‘honour killings’ does indeed go back a long way, and has been found all over the world because it is a manifestation of some of the less savoury aspects of male behaviour and inclination, but is nowadays primarily associated with Muslim countries and cultures (and, to a lesser extent, Sikhs, but that is a minor point). And I’m not accepting some bullshit about how the ancient Romans and Greeks used to do it, because then I’m gonna bring up the much more recent American tradition of lynching black people, perhaps we’d better warn all those black Britons about sitting on buses?

“These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas.”

These sentiments are institutionalised in the sharia codes of entire countries- Pakistan and Jordan spring to mind- and find plenty of resonance in much of the Muslim world. Let’s not airbrush the issue by bringing in orthodox jews or balkan christians.

Sorry, that won’t fly. In the passage you quote, he says ‘protect his womenfolk’, not ‘protect the clan’s honor’. The mention of clan honor isn’t even in that paragraph. You can’t protect people by killing them – that’s simply a contradiction in terms.

Sorry, but that won’t fly. Cole writes “In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her.” He specifically says “protect … from seduction”, not “protect her life”. He doesn’t use the exact words ‘clan honor’, but I think that when he writes “shame on her father, brothers and cousins” he comes close enough.

I agree that it is a contradiction. That’s why I can’t understand why you are so quick to believe that Cole doesn’t.

He specifically says “protect … from seduction”, not “protect her life”.

Ah – good point! You’re quite right. Splendid. Cole is saying that ‘Mediterranean’ men’s ‘honor’ is wrapped up in their ability to keep alien penises out of ‘their’ women’s vaginas, which if all else fails they do by killing the owners of the vaginas. Fine then.

Well, yes, that is what he is saying and it is as stupid as you make it sound. Except that as Cole says and as I pointed out, the killing happens after the men have already failed to keep those alien penises out. So the men are, in effect, meting out capital punishment on the woman for their own failure – and to keep the other women in line.

“Honor” is just a euphemism for shame. Shame is a powerful and archaic emotion. It would perhaps render things more intelligible, though no less horrific, if such incidents were referred to as “shame murders”.